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by joezydeco 6113 days ago
Nobody bought the IBM PC because it was called a "PC". They bought it because it was IBM, and in the 1980s there was a saying: "Nobody ever lost their job buying IBM".
2 comments
mechanical_fish 6113 days ago
Yes, that's right. What I'm saying is that IBM successfully sold the term "IBM PC" because it contained the magic letters I-B-M. But then the magic slowly spread to the other half of the phrase IBM PC, to the point where PC eventually became synonymous with IBM.
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joezydeco 6112 days ago
No, it was because of Compaq.

Compaq won the white-room reverse engineering suits against IBM, opening the door for dozens of manufacturers to make clones of the IBM PC/XT/AT.

Eventually the term "PC Clone" got shortened to "PC" when referring to anything that was compatible with the PC-AT standard.

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pg 6113 days ago
IBM PCs were also more powerful than Apple IIs.
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